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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Chile
Index
Figure 6. Estimated Population by Age and Gender, 1991
Source: Based on information from Chile, Instituto Nacional de
Estadísticas, Compendio estadístico, 1991, Santiago, 1991,
12.
A new decennial census was taken in 1992. Some of its
data were
already available officially as of this writing, but other
data
were still in the process of being tabulated. The total
population
was officially given as 13,348,401, of which 6,553,254
were male
and 6,795,147 were female (see
table 3, Appendix).
According to
that data, the average population density in 1992 remained
17.6
inhabitants per square kilometer. Population density
varied
greatly, however, from the sparsely populated far north
and far
south to the much more densely inhabited central Chile
(see
table 4, Appendix). In 1993 the figure rose to 18 inhabitants
per square
kilometer. The new total population figure shows that the
growth of
the population in the ten years between the 1982 and the
1992
censuses was about 1.7 percent per annum.
The National Statistics Institute (Instituto Nacional
de
Estadísticas--IME) estimated the birthrate in 1991 at 22.4
per
1,000 population, an increase over 1985, when the rate
stood at
21.6 per 1,000. This has led to a corresponding widening
of the
base of the age pyramid of the population, which had
narrowed
significantly with the decline in the birthrate that began
in the
mid- to late 1960s
(see
fig. 6). The current increase in
the
birthrate is a slight demographic echo of the birth
control
programs that began in the mid-1960s. These programs
reduced the
fertility of women of childbearing age, causing the
original drop
in the birthrate, whereas the rise in the early 1990s
resulted from
children born to new generations of women who have reached
the
childbearing period of their lives. Whereas women of
childbearing
age (fourteen to forty-nine years) had had an average of
4.09
children in 1967; by 1992 this average had dropped to
2.39.
With the declining birthrate and no significant
increase in
immigration, much of the growth in the Chilean population
over the
1970s and 1980s resulted from a decline in mortality. The
mortality
rate in 1992 was estimated at 5.6 per 1,000 population,
whereas in
1960 it had been more than twice that, at 12.5 per 1,000.
In 1990
life expectancy at birth was estimated at 71.0 years
(sixty-eight
for men and seventy-five for women), up from the 1960
figure of
57.1 years (57.6 for men and 63.7 for women). These
improvements
resulted in part from better health care beyond the first
year of
life, but they are explained primarily by a dramatic
decline in
infant mortality during the 1960-90 period. In 1960 infant
mortality was 119.5 per 1,000 live births, and by 1991 it
had
declined to 14.6 per 1,000. This latter rate, one of the
lowest in
Latin America, indicated the success of the various health
programs
for expectant mothers and infants implemented since the
late 1960s.
In the early 1990s, the Chilean population was older than
it has
been in the 1960s. The 1982 census revealed for the first
time ever
that the population included a majority of adults over
twenty-one
years of age. Yet it was still a very young population: 49
percent
of Chileans were estimated in 1991 to be less than
twenty-four
years of age.
Data as of March 1994
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